Ars Technica staffers began attending PAX West in 2007, when it was the only Penny Arcade Expo around. A lot has changed in 10 years, but the biggest difference has been the exponential growth of playable independent games on the massive show floor. Even if we didn't have to wait in a single line, four days is simply not enough time to try out the hundreds of indie titles on offer at PAX today.

Still, we did our best, playing dozens of the most interesting games we could get our hands on during this year's show. We've narrowed that list down to 10 you should definitely watch out for, along with a number of honorable mentions that piqued our interest. Consider this far-from-comprehensive effort our attempt to help you filter through the utterly ridiculous number of independent games floating around these days and seek out the best and most innovative for your playing time.

Ape Out

"What would Hotline Miami be like for an ape?" is the best elevator pitch I can think of for Ape Out. Just like that previous Devolver-published game, Ape Out uses an overhead perspective to drive its quick, violent push through the game's corridors. Unlike Hotline Miami, though, this time you're an ape—not an armed hitman—trying to escape through dynamically generated mazes.

What grabs you immediately about Ape Out is its strong and unique sense of style. Your ape is nothing more than a solid-colored silhouette cast against equally stark, quickly blood-soaked floors. That's on top of a jazzy dynamic soundtrack, punctuated with drum beats to match your movements and thrilling cymbal crashes to accompany each violent push.

Ape Out feels almost claustrophobic at times thanks to your limited viewpoint: the visible portion of the world bends around corners and through doorways like a ray of light depending on your position. You'll often catch only a faint glimpse of an armed guard's own visibility cone as you walk by a hallway, forcing you to double back and loop around to surprise him from behind. Discretion is often the better part of valor if you want to avoid being surrounded and outgunned by heavily outfitted guards.

With maze-like corridors that rearrange themselves with each death, Ape Out forces you to think on your feet rather than simply memorize enemy locations and efficient pathways. Hopefully, that will lead to significant replay value as you try to beat your best times.-Kyle Orland

Coffence

PAX West had a fair share of Smash Bros.-style "arena" fighting games on offer, including Brawlhalla and Rivals of Aether. But that's not what I want. I'm hungry for a fighting game that is Smash-like in spirit, not merely in copying the controls and replacing Falco with "Generic Bird Guy." (To be fair, Aether is quite good as an homage to melee-styled Smash.)

Enter Coffence, which combines one of the worst titles of all time with a fresh two-player fighting concept. You use two joysticks to control your brawler, who holds a cup of coffee on a string (essentially, a yo-yo). The left stick moves your character, and the right stick moves the cup, aiming it in any direction. A tap of a button sends the cup flying out, where it hovers for a moment at the apex of the string before flying back.

The object is to hit your opponent's cup with your cup—which means your weapon is simultaneously your hit box. This makes every attack a delicate dance of risk and reward. When a cup is struck, a big drop of coffee flies into the air and hovers in slow-mo. Either player can then catch it with their cup to get one point of health back. (That point is gone for good if it touches the ground.)

Add a rock-paper-scissors system of blocks and counters, a "sacrifice health for a quick bonus" option, and Smash-styled arena options, and you have a decent amount of depth baked into a nonintimidating fighting-game premise.-Sam Machkovech

Dunk Lords

Since NBA Jam's heyday in the mid-'90s, countless games have tried to bring back that effortless two-on-two action basketball feeling (including reboots actually named NBA Jam in 2003 and 2010). Dunk Lords does a better job than most of capturing that feeling of driving it to the hoop with satisfying pick-up-and-play action that helps propel the genre forward.

Any NBA Jam fan will get the basics of Dunk Lords from the moment they pick up the controller: one button to pass or steal, another to jump for a shot or block, and a shoulder button to use a limited turbo gauge. The major difference with Dunk Lords is a focus on brawler-style combat. Each quarter, ballers can unleash character-specific special moves ranging from uppercuts to fireballs. You need to sink shots from specific circles on the floor to gain more attacks, adding an additional wrinkle to the usual positional strategy.

Between quarters, you can use money earned from shots to upgrade your equipment for more power, more speed, or even defenses against your opponents. The addition of this MOBA-style upgrade system keeps Dunk Lords from getting stale and forces you to pay attention throughout four quarters. With a roster of cartoonish characters ranging from a humanoid strawberry to a massive blue bear, there will be plenty of opportunities to find a baller that suits your style.-Kyle Orland

Exception

N++ with a sword. What, you need more convincing than that? Indie gaming is oversaturated with speedrunning platformers (N++, Super Meat Boy, I Wanna Be The Guy), yet Exception proves that adding a weapon to the formula is a good idea. This Geometry Wars-styled, neon-bathed platformer gives players a little jolt of speed whenever they slash through enemies as they run and wall-jump around arenas, which is satisfying enough.

Where Exception really stands out is in combining these attacks with a Project Gotham-styled "kudos" system. Pull off certain maneuvers—like attacking multiple enemies in a single jump or killing an enemy a single frame before running into it—and you'll get seconds slashed off your final recorded time, which in turn awards you higher ratings per level. There's also a "pacifism" bonus for not attacking any enemies in a run, which means players will have to decide whether it's worth sheathing the laser sword to shave seconds in a given level.-Sam Machkovech

Floor Kids

When a popular band or musician is affiliated with a rhythm video game, that usually comes in the form of songs being licensed. For longtime hip-hop DJ and beat maven Kid Koala's first video game, that wasn't going to cut it. Kid Koala himself (born Eric San) came to PAX to demo Floor Kids alongside the game's development team, and he wasted no time picking up a Nintendo Switch and showing us how it's done.

Floor Kids emulates the style and feeling of how B-boys and B-girls chain together breakdancing moves, poses, and freezes to the beat of music. The game supports button taps and screen swipes, and its origins as a smartphone game were evident when San used a mix of single-finger and two-finger swipes on the screen to the beat of the music. His actions triggered and enabled a variety of dance moves.

What jumps out about Floor Kids is its mix of sticking to a song's rhythm and being rewarded for chaining together improvisations and Street Fighter-like moves—which makes it decidedly different from touch-screen rhythm games like Elite Beat Agents or Hatsune Miku. The game's style helps a ton, too, as the hand-drawn, graffiti-styled characters and environs pulse to the music in a very attractive way.

The developers still have work to do to make the button controls feel as fun as their touchscreen counterparts, but even if it's only good in the Switch's portable mode, Floor Kids will be a worthy addition to the rhythm-gaming pantheon.-Sam Machkovech

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21 Reader Comments

"Stifled" reminds me of another horror game with the same premise, namely Dark Echo (http://www.darkechogame.com/). The difference is that Dark Echo is a mobile game, and it is top-down, not 3D - but it also uses sound for visualization mechanics.

Isn't the thing with Advance Wars that it was basically a cheap-ass version of Super Robot Wars? Those games continue to exist on modern platforms and eclipse AW in depth, music and graphics, while keeping similar gameplay. While SRW is a bit hard to get into if you don't know Japanese it's certainly not like there were no games like AW for the last decade.

Probably because Uurnog originally launched as a Humble Original, only available to people who were subscribed to Humble Monthly back in March, and to people who had a sub in June or later as it's been added to Humble Trove (Humble's archive of Originals, created in June, as before that Originals weren't available at all unless you were subscribed to Monthly in their release month).

At PAX West this year I overheard someone claiming to be an editor for Arstechnica being extremely rude to the developer of The Floor is Lava because another editor playing the game was encountering a bug. He was name dropping that he worked for Ars Technica and was just laying into the guy because a bug existed in a disrespectful way. I am fairly certain it was one of the two guys who wrote this article... It really lowered my opinion of this website as a whole unfortunately.

Re: Tempest - wow, Jeff Minter is still at it, I see. I played the original Tempest (maybe it was Tempest 2000) as well as TxD, and I guess that says it all.

Currently playing Darkwood, which reminds me of Don't Starve but with a survival/horror aesthetic. The sound design in the game really creeps me out, I live alone, and really need to stop playing the game at 1am in the morning for the sake of my sanity. Thankfully I'm not brave enough to play it with headphones.

Kickstarted Blasphemous, been playing Deadcells in Early Access, and really need to get around to finishing Hollow Knight. It's a good time to be a gamer.

It’s so odd to me that Nintendo is willing to let Advance Wars die off at the same time Fire Emblem is seeing something of a renaissance, with numerous entries and spinoffs in only a few years.

I’d really wanted to see both series thrive, but I suppose I’ll have to settle for (the admittedly great looking) WarGroove. Warbits on iOS was outstanding, so I have faith that indie devs can get the formula right.

"Stifled" reminds me of another horror game with the same premise, namely Dark Echo (http://www.darkechogame.com/). The difference is that Dark Echo is a mobile game, and it is top-down, not 3D - but it also uses sound for visualization mechanics.

This would be a very interesting mechanic to use in a Daredevil game. Of course, the tone would be completely the opposite. Instead of being powerless and trapped, you would be a total see-around-corners-and-through-walls badass.

Had no idea Wargroove was by the same devs as Stardew, that's cool. It looks great.

Super Meatboy Forever is going to have problems getting traction I think. People at these expos seem to like it alright, but the developers are severely underestimating just how much of a turn off it is for a lot of gamers to turn the game into a runner. On any board I've been to or comments section I've looked at the disinterest and dismissal has been palpable. It could be the best runner ever, but that doesn't seem to be a thing people actually want. when it comes to runners, the game "Runner 3" actually looks a lot more intriguing.